"Northern Rock gets bank bail out"

The most relevant measure of house prices is the ratio of average house prices to average earnings. Here's a summary of a graph produced by the Nationwide available here

Year
1953 4.0 (peak)
1960 3.0 (trough)
1973 4.8 (peak)
1982 3.4 (trough)
1990 4.9 (peak)
1995 2.8 (trough)
2007 6.0 (peak)

Conclusion: House prices go up and down in cycles of about 18 years.

Nobody really knows why, human nature I suppose. I consider it to be A Bad Thing, all-in-all, because it leads to stories like the Northern Rock bail-out (bale-out?). Won't people with savings at Northern Rock just panic* and withdraw everything? They'd be daft not to, really.

All very worrying.

And how do we prevent these house-price (actually, land-price) bubbles? By having an annual tax on land values. If values go up, the tax goes up, so values go down again.

And I'm not saying this because I want to tax people more, I think taxes are far too high, the point is that Land Value Tax does have a lot of positive knock-on effects, unlike taxes on turnover and income that only have negative knock-on effects.
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*UPDATE (10.00 am) there was a huge queue outside the Northern Rock branch round the corner from where I work, TV crews and everything.